Friday, December 6, 2024
Team Smack Down Outdoors moved their business headquarters from Medford, where the business originated, to rural Merrill, about 10 miles (or about 15 minutes drive) northwest of the City of Merrill on Hwy. E. They still maintain a Medford location, but with the expansion of their business this past summer, it made more sense for the actual business headquarters to be in closer proximity to their new home in the Merrill area. The husband-and-wife team of Erin and Justin Novinska are the names and faces behind Team Smack Down Outdoors. Justin started the business in Medford in 2010, and Erin, who had been a good friend of his since high school, originally joined the business as an employee. Their relationship—also based on their common interests of hunting and the outdoors—soon grew and blossomed into a love that culminated in a partnership in business and in life. After dating four years, the couple got married last year and settled into family life with Justin’s now five-year-old daughter, Kennedy. Although perhaps “settled” might be the wrong term, because they are now busier than ever and both work the business full-time, with the assistance of a few other subcontractors who do skinning and other prep work.
The couple designed and built their new headquarters and now juggle a booming business at both locations. “We’re literally always together,” Erin said. “We were close friends for years before we were a thing.”
“It works,” Justin said.
While on Facebook (their official business website) their business is classified under taxidermy—for lack of a more appropriate slot—they are not actually in the business of taxidermy. Taxidermy by definition is related to “the art of preparing, stuffing, and mounting the skins of dead animals” to be exhibited in a lifelike state. Team Smack Down Outdoors doesn’t deal with the animal’s skin, except as necessary to remove it for their processing. Erin said their business could more aptly be referred to as “skull cleaning.”
Team Smack Down Outdoors is a small veteran-owned business, specializing in doing European mounts of animals—typically skull-only mounts, although on occasion they’ve taken on larger projects. Wild game skull mounts—such as skull mounts of deer, bear, elk, etc.—are the bulk of their business.
Typical turnaround time for a European skull mount is six to nine months, they said.
Prior to starting Team Smack Down Outdoors, Justin had been working in the automotive industry in Minneapolis and commuting from New Richmond, Wis., working on a lot of guns and skulls part-time, he said. Justin went to college in Wyoming for auto body/hot rod fabrication and said he lived in the Twin Citites for eight years, but ultimately decided to take the plunge to pursue the business and lifestyle he was passionate about as a full-time endeavor in 2010. He located the business in his hometown of Medford near his father’s home.
Justin, age 37, grew up hunting and fishing and has been hunting nearly 20 years. He shot one of his first trophy bucks when he was just 8 years old. “[I] would commute to the Cities every day because I couldn’t handle living in the city,” Justin said. “But it was nice because my boss lived on a lake, so I bought a boat and kept the boat at his house and I could fish at night at least, but other than that, I was pretty much driving back to Medford every weekend, hunting, fishing.”
Erin, age 32, is fully engaged in the business, performing every aspect of the skull cleaning work and customizing, and also does the business bookkeeping, marketing, and a lot of the direct customer-service work.
Erin, who has also hunted and fished her whole life, served in the U.S. Army and has a bachelor’s degree in sociology. She worked in that field for seven years while working part-time for Justin in the business for eight years. But nearly three years ago she quit her full-time job to join Team Smack Down Outdoors full-time.
Social work is not a breadwinning career, financially, Erin said, and she’d be working in the shop with Justin until midnight or 1:00 a.m. a lot. At that time, Justin also had other employees on staff to help. “It made more sense financially to invest in both of us to be here,” Erin said, rather than her working out and the business paying more employees.
“A big part of our actual skull cleaning business is wholesale work,” Justin said. “Most taxidermists don’t want to mess with European mounts. So they sub them out to us, essentially. We’re subcontractors to them.” He said they currently work with more than 100 different taxidermists in Wisconsin, as well as others in Minnesota, and the Midwest.
Team Smack Down Outdoors also does a lot of retail work, working directly with their customers here in central and north central Wisconsin. Customers can now drop off their animal head and pick up their finished European mount at either their Medford or Merrill location.
Team Smack Down Outdoors is one of—if not the—biggest skull cleaners in the Midwest for sure, and possibly in the nation, Justin and Erin said.
“A bigger European mount guy would do like 200 a year. That would be like a lot,” Erin said, but most of them don’t do it full-time. Even a lot of the taxidermists we work with are part-time, she said. “They work other full-time jobs.”
By comparison, Team Smack Down Outdoors is processing 3,000-4,000 skulls each year.
Their Facebook page describes the business as specializing in “custom and unique art for the outdoors sportsman” ... and indeed their European mounts are art pieces, but they don’t just stop with the mount itself. Team Smack Down offers multiple options for the base to which the European mount will be affixed, as well as skull customization..
The bulk of their business is delivering plain white skulls to customers, typically mounted on a base for hanging, the couple said. But they have also expanded to offer many options for customization.
Hydro dipping is one such option. Instead of the skull being a plain solid white, the skull can be covered with a design or pattern—such as camouflage, a reptile pattern, the American flag, etc. The process is called hydro dipping because the design—which is essentially a film is being applied over the skull—is done by placing the film in water and then dipping the skull into that film to apply the design.
Even though multiple skulls might incorporate the same basic film pattern, “no two skulls are ever going to exactly be the same,” Erin said. While the film may be a repeating pattern, the way that pattern affixes to an individual skull shape will be largely unique.
Every animal head that comes in gets assigned a tag with a unique number that will follow that head/skull through every step of the process, and the couple has a meticulous old-school record-keeping system. “The black binder” or “notebook” keeps every detail about each skull including the customer’s contact information—whether that comes from a taxidermist as a wholesale job or directly from the customer as a retail job, services ordered, and where the skull is in the process. They also frequently take photographs for documentation purposes. “I can’t tell you how many times ewe touch that notebook in a day,” Erin said.
“The big thing is tagging it so we know whose it is,” Erin said.
“These tags—once you clip them on, they don’t come off unless you cut them off,” Justin said.
Initially when skulls come in, they are kept in a freezer. Prior to moving to their new headquarters, we had a full 53-foot semi trailer that we would use, Justin said, and that would be filled with skulls every year. At their new location, they built a large custom walk-in freezer that serves them much better. Building their own walk-in freezer was more efficient economically. “It cost us roughly a hundred dollars a day in diesel fuel to run,” Erin said of the old trailer.
“When we get cranking, we’ll have 2,000 skulls sitting in a freezer,” Justin said, and “probably 200 to 300 skulls in here [in the shop] at a time. And they’re just cycling through.”
The process begins with skinning. Customers can skin their own animal, but if it still needs to be skinned—for which there is a fee—that’s the first step. There is an additional charge if the skull comes in with fur, lower jaw, tongue, and/or eyes due to the additional time and expense associated with skinning, Erin said.
Next comes the process that essentially takes the meat off the bones. Many people ask if we beetle clean, Erin said. “We used to do beetles. And that’s the most common method,” she said. But they’ve since found a bacterial maceration process to be more effective. “It’s basically like a controlled bacterial rot.” It’s not the kind of process someone with a weak stomach will want to do, she said.
Team Smack Down Outdoors uses bacterial maceration, Justin said. “It’s all natural ... It usually takes between 6-10 days, and we try to do about two hundred heads a week.”
Teeth and bones separate from an individual skull and need to be meticulously labeled so they can be reunited with the appropriate skull.
Next comes degreasing the skulls in a chemical bath. Due to the expense of the chemicals used, those tanks are smaller, and this step is the bottleneck of the process, Justin said. “So the degreasing aspect of it can take anywhere from a day to a year,” he said.
A lot of times bear need to go through the whole process many, many times, Justin said. Bear are just greasier, and “the older they are, the greasier they are; they’re not as porous like some of the younger bear.” The more solid the bone structure, the better the grease adheres, he said.
“We get a lot of bears. Bears are very greasy,” Erin said. “Same with ... wild hogs. We’ve had some that we literally are running through for a year.”
During their busiest time, they will have multiple tanks running.
The chemical whitening process comes next and doesn’t take nearly as long. “They only have to be in there for two days,” Justin said.
“Every other day we wash chem,” he said. [Rinse, inspect, set up another chemical bath to put them back into the same process, or move a skull along to the next step.]
Once they’re all done degreasing and getting whitened, the skulls come into the shop and the Novinskas go through them. First they need to gather the bags with the correct tag numbers to focus on each individual skull and all of its parts. Then they need to reassemble and glue the jaw and glue each individual tooth into its correct location, brush them, and sand them as necessary.
Next steps depend on the customization options the customer has selected. If the customer wants hydro dipping to incorporate graphics right onto the skull itself, that process will take place in the shop.
Then the skull is typically mounted for display purposes.
Customers can choose to have their mount affixed to a variety of display options—including barn boards, a live edge wood base, a plain black metal base, a circle plaque or a plaque shaped like the state of Wisconsin, or a custom metal or wood base design. Customized shapes and drop downs and personalization are all available.
And it’s not just deer and bear mounts. “We do everything,” Erin said. “We have an alligator in there right now. We do elk. ... tortoises for zoos, “We do a lot of mountain lions, bobcats, weasels, anything with a skull,” Erin said. And wild boars; they’ve even done a hippopotamus.
They probably do about 50 long horn cattle or livestock skulls a year, too, she said.
Team Smack Down Outdoors also offers hydro dipping and Cerakote® for guns. Cerakote® is a thin-film bake-on ceramic coating suitable for applications to many surfaces, including metal such as firearms, Justin said. “It’s extremely durable,” he said.
Whereas hydro dipping is a film that is susceptible to scratching, “Cerakote® is like concrete. It’s very durable,” Justin said. Some gun manufacturers are even starting to offer it from the factory, he said.
“We do a lot of guns,” Erin said. “People want it customized.” Colors and, in some cases, patterns or scenes, can be used to create a unique customization for each piece.
One person wanted his pistol customized to look like the Milwaukee tool brand, and another wanted his gun to look like a Stihl chainsaw.
They also do a lot of customized motorcycle tanks, catching masks for baseball, hockey masks, and even exhausts. “You can do exhausts with it and it won’t rust or it won’t discolor,” Justin said. It has to get to like 1800 degrees before it would even discolor, he said.
Team Smack Down Outdoors has a large, commercial type oven on site at their headquarters to use for the Cerakote® process.
Since Justin started Team Smack Down Outdoors in Medford in a shop on his father’s property, the couple is keeping that location, as well. In their Medford location, they are able to take drop-offs and arrange for self-service pick-ups for 24/7 availability.
“That’s the city we’ve built a business around,” Erin said, so they definitely wanted to keep that location, as well.
“We actually set up a drop-off station,” Justin said.She said they have it set up with clear instructions laid out and a complete system in place enabling customers to complete their information, label/tag their animal head in the freezer there, and even make payments whenever it is convenient for them. They pick up from the location multiple times per week.
The Medford location is set up for "24/7 self-service access" and "it's been working really well," she said.
“Our circle of customers is fairly big,” Justin said, “and revolves around kind of the center of Medford. But we have a lot of people now that I’ve done work for in Merrill, Marathon and Edgar, or Tomahawk that have always traveled to Medford.”
Having two locations down is really convenient for their customers, as they now have the option to drop off in either Medford or Merrill, the couple said.
While all the skull work is done at the new rural Merrill location, customers can choose to pick up their finished product in either location, as well.
Justin said either he or Erin will physically be available at the Medford location during the rut and rifle deer hunting season with some regularity to accommodate the large volume of customers there.
“I can take my book work over there, and I want to redo the office in there, so we’ll be there all day,” Erin said. “Just because some days in November ... it would be back-to-back customers.”
Justin said they can easily have 100 customers a day during rush time, and this way they will also be able to help customers in person and maintain that face time with their customers.
Erin said Team Smack Down Outdoors has their roots in Medford, but now they really want to experience that same sense of community here in the Merrill area, as well.
“We want that community,” Erin said.
Justin said one of the best—and worst—parts of being in this business is the stories. “I like listening to everybody’s hunting stories,” he said. “And I can talk hunting—it’s bad. Like, if I get into a hunting conversation with a customer, it’s like five hours later.”
“But that’s what’s really cool about what we do,” Erin said, “because it’s something we both like ... we get to hear such cool stories.”
“The youth population is very near and dear to us,” she said. “We love hearing when kids shoot their first buck.” She said they do a lot to help support and encourage youth hunting.
The address for Team Smack Down Outdoors new headquarters is N3143 Cty. Hwy. E, Merrill, BUT putting that address into GPS will NOT take you to the correct place. Instead, search for “Team Smack Down Outdoors Headquarters” in Google maps to get directions. Or if you are familiar with the area, it is just north of Ollhoff Ave.
Most of the time, Team Smack Down Outdoors operates by appointment at their rural Merrill location. Call to set up a time to come by, Erin said. “We don’t turn down business. We really try to be accommodating to customers.”
“With our wholesale business, we offer our taxidermists free pickup and delivery,” Erin said, “so a lot of times we’re not here because we’re out doing pickups and deliveries. We deliver to our taxidermists all over the state ... and we have to work our schedule around the taxidermist’s schedule. So our hours are hit and miss.”
The address for the Team Smack Down Outdoors Medford 24/7 drop-off and pick-up location is N5002 Ballpark, Medford.
Call Erin or Justin at Team Smack Down Outdoors at 715.496.0444 or message them on their Facebook page, which doubles as their website, at: facebook.com/deerskullguy.
As a veteran-owned business, Team Smack Down Outdoors also offers other veterans a discount of $20 off their orders this season.
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